The World Finds Nothing (Sacred)

weeks ago, I peeled away the top translucent layer of each eyeball, leaving them
slickly finished like cheap wood varnish, like the tacky ring
from a soda can sitting too long in a cup holder. this as if beneath a slow and heavy
sun, dipping down and down into us all. a slow motion stutter.

(we were each other’s eyes in a gunshot of light and it seared us into wounds. but
that history once rhymed remains a rumor, a ghost long-smothered by new
religions, narcissism and narcolepsy.

elbow grease and the fear of a hell which damns each to live uncelebrated.)

perhaps, it was only ever morning in fantasy? even after we prised open each of our
eyelids, fingers moving like secret breathing kept thrilling like a crime low to the
ground. like onions picked too young, fragile and wound in a million veins, of soft
and crisping skins, becoming slowly pieces as the light left us behind.

ii.
for blindness comes over us in the winter like a numbing. it is dark in the human heart.

we reduce ourselves to urges, our hands and mouths turn us into vehicles stopped
and starting like machines, gruff and growl, a twanged tongue lapping at a pool of
gasoline. we feel our way around this horticulture of suffering, a forest thick with
alterations and self-preserving meditations we have built to keep out
strangers whom we have never known but do not let be like ourselves.

fatigue is a creature unbecoming to compassion. the news morphs even into that
same slickness, a tabloid of toxicity that feeds us gently into the dark.

it is nothing really.

it is dreams where we have filled our sockets, each to his own.

it is the skin stretched over a willow tree that bends and bows, pockmarked ugly
with acute yearning- a sensation born a suicide that has become a fable.